Good morning. This is the day that the Lord has made! Let us rejoice and give thanks =).
Last night as I started thinking and then praying about what to write today I got so excited that it was hard to fall asleep. It was the beginning of a shift in thinking and knowing that puts things more correctly in perspective.
This whole week has been steeped in little miracles straight from the Father's hand. It has been delightful to revel in that with you, to give Him glory and credit and thanks. The thing is, I hope I would do at least as good a job of rejoicing in God's goodness and lavish love if the week had gone differently and I were now writing to you blind in one eye and physically scarred for life. Had that been the outcome it would not have diminished His boundless compassion one bit. The truth is that even if He never did a single kind thing for me during the course of my lifetime He already gave me the greatest gift in the history of the universe. Long before I was born He felt the rift of sin between us, and He chose to heal it. He chose to leave heaven and come to this fallen, broken world. He chose to live a life free from sin, though he faced pain and temptation like we all do, and though He had to live as an impoverished illegitimate man in a patriarchal society all about genealogy. Although He dreaded doing it, He willingly went to the cross and was executed like a common criminal. He did that all so that He could share His righteousness with me and with you, and bring us into healed relationship with Him for all eternity. He loves us that much.
So if He had opted not to intervene in my situation Easter week, if He had allowed me to go blind and be permanently scarred, I would still hope to sing the praises of His love and goodness. I would still hope to trust in His character and await the day when we will finally meet face to face with eager anticipation.
But He did choose to act mightily and in astounding ways on my behalf this week. So I've been praying about why that is, and I think it has to do with His reframing my perspective of the past.
This week of blogging began with the clear understanding, at long last, that He created me to need and as a consequence, to receive. There's a reason that lesson came at the beginning. There's an old, old wound that needed cleaning out and dressing to heal properly.
From the moment that my mother conceived me in love and in sin, I heard her heartbeat. I heard it every day until my premature birth. I heard it in the hospital with me, and when I was released to her care I heard it every day as she fostered me for three months before I went home with my adoptive parents. When I didn't hear her heartbeat anymore, I cried. I grieved, actually. Did you know that babies grieve? I learned that in a developmental psychology class. It makes sense. I just had never really considered it. Anyway, my adoptive father said I "would not stop screaming" for the first two weeks I lived with them. He said he didn't think they would ever get me "to shut up." They found a way.
In the family folklore one of the favorite stories my father would tell with pride was how he and my mother decided that they would keep me in an empty room on the back of their house so that I would "learn to entertain [my]self and not need attention." There was a nursery in their house. It was outfitted with the usual baby things. The nursery is where I spent the night. During the daytime I was in a room with plain white walls. A room empty of anything except a baby monitor and the wind up swing the adults would place and leave me in for the day. My parents made it a point not to respond quickly when I cried. That would have defeated the purpose.
That set the stage for at least two significant developments I can see in my life. One, which to me reads as clear evidence of God's redeeming hand on everything, is that I have a rich imagination and can turn anything into a game in a heartbeat. If you've ever seen the movie Amélie - one of my all time favorites - it's a little like that. Two, I learned that needing is risky, usually hurts, and frequently goes unanswered. Someone once observed that people who struggle with mental illness are often convinced of the following assumptions: the world is an unsafe place; I am inherently unacceptable; and, I am unworthy of love. Looking back I can see those lies of the enemy at play in my life. They set me up to collaborate in making much of the misery that used to follow me everywhere. I allowed them to lower my expectations a lot.
An unintended consequence was that they deformed my perception of God. My family identified themselves as Christian. I have no idea what it meant to them to say that, though. There was harsh talk in our house about "church people." My father hated Mother Theresa. He called her "that nosy little nun" and said he couldn't stand how she was always getting involved in things that were none of her business. When my mother was dying several people referred to my mother as "the most Christian person I have ever known." Before she got sick she talked with me about God at least once. Somewhere she had gotten this little bottle. It was frosted plastic and fit in the palm of her hand. The cap was robin's egg blue, and dainty metallic lettering across the front of the bottle said "Holy Water." One of my legs was mangled when I was born. The doctors told my parents I might never walk. Eventually I learned to limp, and my parents had me fitted for a series of painful metal leg braces designed to stretch my leg to a normal length and position. I wore the braces all day and slept in them at night for years. All they did was hurt. Other than my level of pain nothing changed. By the time I was seven I didn't have to wear the braces anymore. My parents had given up on them making a difference. My mother had found the bottle of Holy Water.
She locked us in her bedroom and swore me to secrecy. She said we were going to ask God to heal my leg. I don't remember if she prayed before she put the holy water on my leg. I only recall that around the same time she had given me one of those little charms with a mustard seed inside it, with that quote from the gospel of Matthew about how if you have faith as small as a mustard seed you can say to a mountain "Move from here to there," and the mountain will move, nothing will be impossible for you. When God didn't heal my leg I thought I must not have believed right, or maybe I displeased Him somehow. A short time later when my mother got sick with the cancer that would eventually kill her I tried very hard to believe that He would answer my prayers and let her live. I didn't have much hope that God would do that, though. My expectations had already been lowered. [Years later when God did heal my leg through surgery following a painful accident I was so far removed from Him that I couldn't see His hand at work. Actually I only made the connection between that early prayer and the eventual healing just last night. Sometimes I think He must be fascinated by my ability to continue adding 2 and 2 together, getting anything but 4 as the answer, but I digress...]
Those two experiences - God opting not to heal my leg instantly, and God allowing my mother to die - left my immature, confused mind with the impression that God must be no more interested in meeting my needs, loving me, or showing compassion to me than my parents were when they kept me isolated in that stark empty room. It was a little worse than that, though. If my mother was one of the most Christian people in the world and God let her suffer that excruciating illness and death despite her prayers for a miracle, I figured He would really hurt regular people like me. A child's mind makes those kinds of leaps.
I believe this week has been about God cleaning out and binding up those old wounds so that they can heal completely. About three of four weeks ago I began praying to the Lord that if there was any hidden anger, bitterness or resentment in my heart He would bring it to light and heal it. If you've never seen shingles, let me just say, they look pretty darned angry.
God in His sovereignty could have opted not to intervene in this latest illness. Instead He chose to show up in unmistakable ways. He has surrounded me gently yet powerfully with his love to a degree that cannot be missed or denied. And I think He has done it to raise my expectations, because my lowering them had limited how He could relate to me.
I've been through loss and illness and pain like many people - more than some, less than others. People with a secure base of God's love in their lives handle those things differently than I've handled them. They handle the trials with an expectation of God's steadiness through it all. In my life as a Christian over the last 11 years I have worked hard to cultivate an expectation of God's presence, but deep down I only expected Him to make the excruciating bearable. I limited Him by refusing to allow for the possibility that He might restore the wonder and joy and love in my life, and that He might dare to increase it because that's Who He is!
I'm sorry, Abba. Thank you for forgiving me. Thank you for never once leaving me where you found me. Please keep loving me the way You want to love me. Please help me love You the way You deserve to be loved, and to see You for who You really are. Amen.
Sing with me now, y'all:
He is jealous for me,
loves like a hurricane
I am a tree
bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy
All of a sudden
I am unaware
of these afflictions eclipsed by Glory
and I realize just how beautiful You are
and how great your affections are for me
So heaven meets earth
like an unforeseen kiss
and my heart turns violently inside of my chest
and I don't have the will to maintain these regrets
when I think about the way
He loves us, oh how He loves us
how He loves us all!
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